


Things You Said I Wouldn't Understand

by talefeathers



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23753512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talefeathers/pseuds/talefeathers
Summary: Roland is always telling Cuthbert that he wouldn't understand. Maybe Cuthbert wouldn't, but he'd appreciate the chance to try.
Relationships: Cuthbert Allgood & Roland Deschain
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7
Collections: The Dark Tower, Tumblr Drabbles





	Things You Said I Wouldn't Understand

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Things you said that I wouldn't understand."
> 
> I usually try to be a little more creative with the titles of these lol but I just didn't have it in me this morning. I hope you can forgive me! <3
> 
> Update I just realized I wrote this exact prompt for these exact characters almost three years ago ([An Understanding](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15649884)!) Ka is a wheel, folks.

“You wouldn’t understand.” Roland was always saying that. Scoffing it. Sighing it. “I can’t explain, and even if I could, you wouldn’t understand.”

And maybe Cuthbert wouldn’t. Their paths had splintered off from one another in a pretty extreme way that fateful day in their fourteenth year, the day Roland had bested Cort and become the youngest gunslinger ever to be sent east. He’d established himself, then, as something more than any of the rest of them, as a protagonist in a much larger story, whereas Cuthbert knew he was comic relief at best.

“You wouldn’t understand.” No, perhaps not. But Vannay had always credited him as being the most imaginative of their little cohort of ‘prentices, and he’d have appreciated the chance to try. To try and imagine what Roland must be going through, what weighty quest rested on his shoulders.

To try and help.

“Tell me anyway,” Cuthbert replied, again and again. “Explain as best you can and tell me anyway.”

It wasn’t until Roland finally buckled and spilled what he’d been carrying that Cuthbert realized, with a species of horror, that it had never been about understanding at all.

Roland, in that stubborn, stolid way of his, had been trying to protect them.

“To aid me toward the Tower is to be doomed,” he said, with tears in his shooter’s eyes. “It is to be  _ damned. _ You and Alain, you’re my friends, I. I couldn’t ask that, not after everything in Mejis, I couldn’t --”

Cuthbert didn’t let him finish, pulled him roughly into an embrace.

“Roland, my dear, you know I’m already well on my way to a damnation of my own making,” Cuthbert cracked, unable to help himself, and, blessedly, that made Roland laugh. Cuthbert tightened his hold on his oldest, best friend. “But even if I wasn’t, you’ve gotta know I’d walk into hell whistling if that’s where you were going. If that’s where you needed me to go. You don’t have to ask.”

Roland was laughing and crying in equal measure, now, and in spite of all assertions to the contrary, Cuthbert did understand. He understood that Roland wept because he was knowingly leading his friends to their deaths, and that was a guilt he’d never shake.

But Roland was human, too, as much as he tried not to be. And so he laughed, because Cuthbert was with him, and he didn’t want to do this alone.


End file.
